The Big Deals Keep Rolling In...

Buckle your real estate safety belts, butter beans...

On the heels of knee-buckling news that legally blind casino tycoon Steve Wynn dropped a staggering $70,000,000 on an almost 11,000 square foot duplex spread on New York City's swank Central Park South comes new news about an as-yet unidentified buyer agreeing to pay between ninety and $100,000,000 for the not-yet-finished, nearly 11,000 square foot duplex penthouse that sprawls across the 89th and 90th floors of One57, a gleaming 1,000-foot tall tower going up at 157 West 57th Street designed by Moroccan-born and Paris-based architect (and 1994 Pritzker Prize winner) Christian de Portzamparc.

The Midtown tower's developer Gary Barnett, president of Extell Development Corporation, told The New York Times the penthouse was not sold to someone from Russia, the Ukraine or "'any other part of the former Soviet Union.'" He went on to hint the obviously very rich buyer is "'someone that people would recognize'" and plans to use the penthouse as a private residence for his "'very nice family.'"

Little is known about the two-floor penthouse—the developer has kept most of the details of the building's larger units out of the press—but is said to have a "grand salon" with 23-foot ceilings and extraordinarily 360-degree views.

Mister Barnett further expounded that a different buyer, a foreign buyer, was earlier this year interested in combining a 13,500 square foot lower floor duplex (with separate solarium) with another full floor apartment that would have brought the total size to around 20,000 square feet. Alas, the deal fell through but the developer said but that stomach-churner of deal would have been worth between $100-150 million.

Even with all the humongous deals that have gone done recently in New York—the $88 million purchase at 15 Central Park West by Russian billionaire, Dmitry Rybolovlev, the $52.5 million dollar deal at 740 Park and Mister Wynn's $70 million real estate bauble atop the Ritz Carlton—the numbers still pale in comparison to London where, as noted in the New York Post, Ukrainian billionaire Rinat Akhmetov reportedly paid somewhere around $230 million for his palatial pied-a-terre at the punishingly pricey One Hyde Park.

Maybe the buyer at One57 is one of those very young and very rich Ecclestone heiresses who have been snatching up exorbitantly high-priced properties in both London and Los Angeles over the last couple of years and were rather reverently profiled in The Wall Street Journalthis morning? We doubt it but stranger things have happened.